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###CONVERSATION LESSON

Dan: Okay, today we’re talking about falling.

Aaron: That’s right. Falling. Free falling.

Dan: I hear an interesting story last week about falling.

Aaron: Tell me. What is it?

Dan: I was listening to this podcast and this guy was telling this story about his friend who had cancer, and he was undergoing chemotherapy so he was losing his hair. One day, his friend is at a gas station and the woman across from him pumping gas and she says to him, “Is that like a middle aged hair loss thing or are you shaving your head to be sexy?” So he thinks, “Oh okay, this attractive woman is flirting with me.” He’s kind of into it. Anyhow, he gets her card and he calls her the next day. He just feels like he has known this woman his whole life and he just feels this instant connection. He feels really comfortable. She says, “Why don’t you come over and let’s hang out.” He goes over there and he’s telling her about his cancer and he just feels really open and he’s telling her just everything. She’s listening and she’s very sympathetic. Then it kind of changes tracks and she starts talking about this investment opportunity. And she says, “I got something… This may sound a little strange, but I wanted to share with you that I know these guys and they were somewhere in the Himalayas and they’ve this discovered this snowman that can bench press 200 pounds.” Aaron: A snowman.

Dan: A snowman that can bench press 200 pounds. “And these guys it’s amazing and these guys are going to make a reality TV show and they’re going to put this all global all over the world and they’re going to make a lot of money and they’re taking investments for people who want the rights for the TV show in different regions.”

Aaron: Well, I hope he didn’t fall for that.

Dan: So the US was all taken, but Indonesia, you can get in and get the rights for Indonesia for this reality TV show for 25 grand. There’s a whole load of questions there. First of all, this is a magic snowman, but why bench press?

Aaron: Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense.

Dan: Is the bench press made out of snow? What’s this snowman’s… If you all of a sudden come to life, that’s what you want to do? Anyhow, he says to his friend, “I met this woman. She tells me this crazy story and I know it sounds crazy but I feel like I’ve got limited time on this Earth and I’m going to take a chance.” His friend who’s telling the story was like, “Whoa, my friend has lost it and he’s fallen for this ridiculous story but if that’s what he wants to do with his money and that’s what he wants to do with his last moments, is to just kind of invest in this fantasy that makes him happy, then maybe I shouldn’t get involved.” Anyhow, he ends up telling this story to a lot of people. The guy is a writer for some famous magazine. And he says he even asked his friend, “Do you mind if I write about this story?” And the guy says, “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.” Then the guy passes away. Then later on he finds out that it wasn’t that guy, the guy who had cancer didn’t fall for the story. It was him that fell for the story. That the guy who had cancer just made up that story about this woman at a gas station and about investing $25,000 in a magic snowman because he just likes to make up crazy stories and it brought his friends happiness to talk about how silly he had been. That was just his weird sense of humor.

Aaron: So the writer that was writing about this has fallen for it? He believed it?

Dan: Yeah, he thought his friend had fallen for the story, but it was really him. You ever fallen for…? So in case anyone doesn’t know, ‘to fall for something’ means to believe something that’s not true, to be gullible, to be over trusting, to fall for something.

Aaron: Yeah, I’ve certainly fallen for things in my life. I can’t think of anything specifically off of the top of my head. Especially ass a younger man, I’ve fallen for all kinds of things. I’ve fallen in love.

Dan: Okay, and there’s another kind of falling. This word ‘falling’, it’s got so many different uses in English and I think usually it’s got a negative sort of meaning, to fall for something means to believe something silly, to be over trusting. But to fall in love also has this feeling of loss, of letting go, loss of reason, and to just follow your emotions, to fall in love or to lose control, but of course it’s positive because there’s love involved. But there’s the same idea of loss. So to fall for something would be to lose your reasoning ability. To fall in love also is a kind of loss but leading to something great.

Aaron: And I think that whole notion of falling is intimately connected with the idea of losing control. I think this is also why it is a very common, recurring dream that people have in their sleep of falling, whether it’s off of a cliff or off of a bridge, and it’s a terrifying kid of dream and perhaps it’s connected with that same idea of just not having control over your life and that causes fear.

Dan: Right. Speaking of dreams, falling is a very common one, as we’ve said in the story, connected with a loss feeling, a loss of control in your life, and maybe it manifests as falling in your dream. But another kind of common dream is flying which is kind of the flipside of… I mean, both you have this idea of weightlessness, but one is a sense of freedom, and the other is a sense of, well, you’re going to hit the ground and you’re in for some serious pain, death. Falling and flying, two common themes, you ever had either of those dreams?

Aaron: Yeah, I’ve had both of those dreams. I usually wake up before I fall. Not recently I haven’t, but I’ve had dreams of flying recently, being able to control my body through the air and they’re quite realistic and quite amazing. But I wake up from those, too. I’m not still dreaming, I think. I think it’s such an interesting theme that’s connected to our lives and that’s why we chose this theme for our Core Audio this month because there’s a lot of interesting stories out there related to falling and we chose two of them.

Dan: And I guess both of those stories kind of illustrate those two type of dream themes, falling in a negative sense and flying freedom.

Aaron: Yeah, flying with freedom. This story about Juliane Koepcke who fell from this plane that was falling apart, first of all of course it’s an amazing story. You wouldn’t expect someone to survive a 9,000-foot fall. But what I find interesting about it is the fact that she survived, we suspect, and people who have studied the story suspect, that she survived due to the resistance created by this helicopter effect of her being at one end of a 3-bank seat, and then that spinning around like a maple leaf seed and falling to the ground. And then when she hit the jungle canopy, it broke her fall even further because the branches were flexible, and that slowed her down enough to where she could actually survive. Wow, that’s pretty incredible.

Dan: So her ability to survive was due to the fact that the other people in her row flew out and that caused the lack of balance which caused the helicopter effect. So that’s kind of interesting to think about that her ability to resist that fall was due to a sacrifice of these other people.

Aaron: And then when you look at the other story of this man, Jeb Corliss, this wingsuit BASE jumper, he chooses to put himself in situations where he’s falling through the sky at a very high rate of speed. And it is through the air resistance of his wingsuit that he’s able to exert some kind of control which keeps him alive. So in both stories, even though one of them actually happens to someone unexpectedly and the other one is he’s putting himself in that situation, in both cases it’s resistance to falling which causes survival. And I find that pretty interesting, almost a metaphor in a way of our own lives. I mean, if you think about the idea of, if you want to look at it this way that we’re all falling in a way, meaning that death is our ultimate point of arrival and it’s through our resistance maybe to that process that keeps us alive. It’s that desire to live, to get food, to get water, to cooperate with other people, to enjoy our lives. It creates energy and that’s kind of a resistance to this natural process of death.

Dan: On one hand, you can look at falling as sacrifice and surrender just letting go, or then there’s kind of the other side of the story, it’s not really completely letting go, it’s resisting, because without resistance. Just like that plane, everything falls apart.

Aaron: That’s actually a law in science, in physics, is the law of entropy, meaning that all systems, anything that exists naturally wants to disintegrate.

Dan: Falling apart. There’s another phrasal verb, ‘to fall apart’ where things just breakdown. Sometimes we talk about falling apart emotionally and when our life is just influx and things a lot of bad things are happening and we just feel like we can’t keep things together, we say that we’re falling apart. You ever felt that way?

Aaron: Yeah, I’ve fallen apart in sports like where you just lose your concentration and you just perform really badly when I was a younger man. Yeah, it fell apart. Emotionally, I suppose I’ve maybe fallen apart a few times in my life but nothing, luckily, very, very serious. But I think all of us experience falling apart. Some days I feel like I can’t keep it all together. It’s true.

Dan: Some days when we just have all of these lessons to write and to record and website problems, I feel like everything is falling apart but we always manage to pull it together. So fall apart, pull it together.

Aaron: Pull it together, you can actually use that as a command. “Hey man, don’t fall apart. Pull it together man. You can do it. Pull it together.”

Dan: Pull it together. Get it together.

Aaron: Get it together. I’m always saying that to you.

Dan: And I always pull it together for the both of us, right? On my wings, we both fly.

Aaron: Actually, speaking of flying, this guy, Jeb Corliss, is he totally insane?

Dan: I think, I don’t know. I know that you found some of his quotes inspirational, but I just feel like he just kind of trivializes this precious gift of life that we have.

Aaron: Okay, that’s one way of looking at it. I see it more as a way to celebrate the life that we have. I mean he obviously gets something very, very positive out of that.

Dan: I think he’s getting adrenaline. He’s just getting a shot of adrenaline, it’s exciting and he’s getting some attention from people watching his videos.

Aaron: It’s true but he may need that to keep it together. You know what I mean? For him, he thinks it’s absolutely insane the way we live our lives, maybe not you and me but just people in general, live our lives by going to the same job every day, commuting over and over again, until you’re 60 or 70 and you die, and he said that’s insane. I don’t think he could emotionally or mentally survive that kind of life. He needs this maybe to thrive, whereas we certainly don’t.

Dan: I mean, what is the fatality or the death rate of BASE jumpers? Must be really high.

Aaron: It is high. If you actually Google BASE jumping and look at the Wikipedia, you’ll see many deaths that are occurring every year, and especially now that it’s becoming more and more popular, more and more people are finding out about this sport, if you want to call it a sport, it’s a very extreme activity. But the death rate is very high, it’s extremely dangerous. And if you watch some of the videos of what wingsuit BASE jumpers do, they come so close to death. And if you make any mistake, that’s it, you’re a goner.

Dan: Okay. I mean it’s amazing. I love watching these videos. I think it’s incredible but you know, for what? If you want to risk your life for the greater good to save your family or friends or advanced science or somehow help humanity, it’s like okay. But you doing that, what is the payoff? Well, you get a lot of views on YouTube.

Aaron: I don’t think that’s why people do it. I don’t think it’s about recognition as much as it’s about an expression of their life energy and that’s how they choose to do it. You know, to each his own. So who are we to judge those guys?

Dan: I’m the judge.

Aaron: You’re the judge. Judge Douglass.

Dan: Silly. He’s a silly man.

Aaron: But I do like his quote about failure–

Dan: Remind me. What does he say about failure?

Aaron: He says that success is inevitable. If you keep at something and you keep going, success will come and the only way that you can fail is if you decide to fail. You choose to give up. You decide I can’t do this anymore. And he says that’s you doing that. Of course, little failures happen but those are stepping stones to success. Don’t choose to fail and you will succeed and I find that motivating.

Dan: Okay, I can buy into that and I also like the idea that for any great reward in life we got to take risks.

Aaron: We got to take risks and we got to work hard. There’s no doubt. So I suppose if you took that idea and applied it toward your efforts at becoming fluent in a foreign language, and for our listeners that’s English. You’re going to experience times where you feel like giving up, like you feel like you’re not making progress, you feel like things are not happening. That is if you choose to give up, that’s your choice and you are choosing failure, whereas if you stay at it and you keep practicing, things will move eventually and you will succeed. Everyone will. And if you don’t, you die before you succeed, you’re on the path to success. So it’s not failure. It’s just a different way of looking at it.

Dan: I mean the difference in failure at language learning is what’s the worse that happens? Somebody laughs at you? A lot of times, I think that’s a very real response people have. They have this very emotional guttural feeling of, oh my God.

Aaron: People are going to judge me, they’re going to laugh at me, they’re going to think I’m stupid.

Dan: I look like a fool. But really in reality the stakes are so small and the rewards are so great.

Aaron: Yeah. There’s just so much you can gain from speaking English fluently.

Dan: And so much you can gain from making mistakes. I remember the times people have laughed at me learning different languages. Those are the times that really stuck in my mind and I really learned something. It’s not just about myself, about my own problems, worrying too much or thinking too much about what other people think, but also it really imprinted on me what that mistake was.

Aaron: Yeah, because you remember it so much more deeply when it happens that way rather than reading about it in a textbook, maybe having a teacher in a formal situation point that mistake out to you. When you realize your mistake in an experiential way through a conversation or through people laughing at what you said, it’s like once you realize what you’ve done, wow, you don’t do it again because it sunk so deeply.

Dan: But I mean at the end of the day, it is so really meaningless. It’s all about building our awareness of our own ego and realizing that there’s no damage done from making mistakes, only steps to greater learning.

Aaron: That’s right. There’s way more to gain than to lose, so just got to keep it together. Don’t fall apart.

Dan: All right. Keep it together, buddy.

Aaron: You too.